J.P. Morgan: Feature phone sales to remain flat next year

United States’ largest bank J.P. Morgan corrected their estimates of mobile phone shipments for this and next year. It’s highly interesting that J.P. Morgan expects flat feature phone shipments in 2017 and 2018, or about 320 million units, lower than last year’s 400 million.

Last year, Microsoft and HMD combined took about 9% of the feature phone market share, which is a historical low for Nokia-branded devices. I was quite disappointed with such a low market share, but it was no surprise, because Microsoft crippled the S30(+) removing the dedicated browser and app store, and replacing it with inferior Opera solutions. I’m not sure if J.P. Morgan took a possible “3310” effect into consideration, but with the 3310 HMD could improve its feature phone market share.

Another interesting statistic comes from Statista. They covered a Pew Research that shows smartphone and feature phone market share in some “developed countries”. We know that developed countries usually have an older populace compared to the global average, that are more prone to feature phones. It’s still surprising to see that almost 20% of US adults, or almost 30% of German adults use feature phones. In general, this number would be much lower if under aged teens were counted, because almost all young people use smartphones.

The Pew Research and J.P Morgan’s analysis show that there is a stable market for feature phones, at least in the next 2 years, and HMD’s continuing support for such phones will surely pay off, eventually.